It's two hours past the 9 a.m. call time, and Dominique Crenn's publicist has been texting her every 10 minutes, when she finally arrives at her soon-to-open restaurant for the ELLE photo shoot. With her thick black hair looking rock 'n' roll mussed, her large, dark eyes rimmed in kohl, and a big scarf wrapped, city cool-girl style, around her vintage cotton army jacket, she looks less like a chef and more like a French indie actress in the vein of Charlotte Gainsbourg. A hot female chef who wears Rag & Bone and Margiela is an unusual creature, but the fact that she's to be found in, let's admit it, frumptopia San Francisco, has a Michelin star on her CV, and is cooking in the male-­dominated molecular gastronomy mode of elBulli's Ferran Adrià makes her as rare as a unicorn.

She apologizes—she'd returned the previous night from a week researching in Spain, and that morning had to join an emergency meeting at Luce, the restaurant at the InterContinental hotel she's leaving to open Atelier Crenn, for which she also has to prep an investors' dinner for 50 that night. But with her presence—skin still glowing as she downs, she confesses, a fifth espresso—any irritation in the room vanishes. "The coffee is so good in Spain, forget Italy or France—and forget my old menu, it's all changing now. I am so inspired," she says in rapid-fire, French-inflected sentences. She has the star's gift, that ability to pull everyone into her current and the present moment.

It'll come in handy for what she's trying to do at Atelier. After years of being the foodie groundbreaker, San Francisco has become the locus of some mockery for being stuck in the "perfect-peach" syndrome; that is, one ripe peach being considered valid to serve as a $12 dessert. Or, as Momofuku's David Chang admonished after a visit, "Every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate."

Crenn, too, shares the obsession with the aesthetics and ethics of cooking seasonally and locally, even going so far as to start a single-source partnership with the Gouge Eye Farm two hours away. "Ingredients matter," she says, "but you can't grow if you don't evolve." She's hoping to be the instrument of change by taking No-Cal farm-to-table principles beyond the rustic style with which they've been anchored and applying them to cutting-edge haute cuisine, putting herself in conversation with chefs from around the world, such as Noma's René Redzepi and Adrìa and daring the literal-minded lefty locals to engage with conceptual cookery.

Her tools include the foams and gels and sous-vide (cooking vacuum-sealed food in a warm water bath) of molecular gastronomy, but also memories. That may suggest the nurturing food that has put other female chefs like Suzanne Goin and April Bloomfield on the map, but Crenn's dishes are not homey fare, nor are they hearty—modest portions and a light touch make believable her claims that her impossibly skinny self eats her own food. What they add to the global challenging-food conversation, which often feels less about gustatory joy and more about man and Cryovac machine, is, however, something that's hard not to describe as feminine for its sense of nar­rative and unapologetic emotionality.

Her Le Jardin d'Hiver salad, a miniature world made of perfectly poached vegetables, is a fairy-tale creation that engages all the senses—from the miniature scale of the carrot and parsnip "forest" to the sound of the rye breadcrumb "soil" crunching in your teeth, interrupted by salty squeaks of dehydrated black olive. Being presented with it, you are tempted to shrink down and walk up the potato mountain, or lie beneath the carrot fronds and dream. Crenn writes poetry in her spare time, and she writes her menus to read like poems:

Oyster and the Ocean, Sea Urchin and Lemon Cloud Walk in the forest, the wild and the cold (vegetables)Foie gras and winter nuances

As a child, Crenn vacationed in Brittany, where her politician father had a painting workshop he called his atelier. After his retirement, he moved there full-time. Crenn named the space in homage to his impressionistic art and her memories of foraging for blackberries and mushrooms with him, and because, in the Beaux Arts workshop tradition, the atelier is a place to experiment and explore.

She trained with Jeremiah Tower at Stars in SF, then, after stints living in Jakarta and Los Angeles, she returned to helm Luce in 2007. In 2008, Esquire named her Chef of the Year, and she was awarded her Michelin stars at Luce in 2010 and 2011 (and also won last year on Iron Chef America). But although she could get away with blue-cheese ice cream, she still had to make the compromises of a hotel restaurant. Here, she says, "There's no Sprite, no Sweet'N Low!" She can work unfettered in the cozy, unpretentious 40-seat space that nevertheless has the appropriate air—with its Japanese-reminiscent crackle bowls and natural woods—of a temple to cuisine. Diners are offered either a prix fixe or tasting menu. "You can't come by for a glass of wine or a salad, it's an experience," she says. Charmingly set at the foot of a steep hill on Fillmore Street in the swanky Cow Hollow district, away from the more trendy eating epicenter of the Mission, it feels like a calm island, a place where her cookery will get the attention it deserves. "I wish everyone could have the luxury of realizing their dreams, if only for a short time," Crenn says. She has a tattoo on her right forearm of a girl gazing up at a small, perennially fluttering winged pig, "When pigs fly," says Crenn, explaining the image, "it's all possible."

1. Heat water to 64°C (147°F). Use a thermometer to monitor the temperature. Add the eggs (still in shell) and cook undisturbed for 45 minutes.

2. While the eggs are cooking, make a bouquet garni by using a piece of kitchen string to tie the bay leaf, thyme, and parsley together into a tight, neat bundle.

3. In a saucepan over medium-low heat, add mushrooms and cook, stirring, until they soften and start to release their liquid. Add white wine and stir to combine with mushrooms. When wine starts simmering, add vegetable stock, butter, and the bouquet garni. Simmer until mushrooms are fully tender and liquid is reduced a bit. Add salt and pepper to taste.

4. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Dip the edge of the kale in the oil; it should sizzle immediately. Add the kale and fry until the edges are crispy and the leaf looks almost transparent. Transfer kale to a cooling rack or layers of paper towels to drain. Add sea salt to taste. When cool enough to handle, break into bite-size pieces.

5. In each of four bowls, carefully crack and shell one egg, arrange a quarter of the mushrooms around the egg, and sprinkle with pieces of fried kale.